Your website is your storefront display. Customers regardless of how they find out about your business, usually go to your website to get more information about your business. So be sure that your online presence really reflects your business.

Just like how we decide whether we will go into a brick and mortar business based on the display, a website provides potential customers with glimpse of what you have on offer. So it should reflect your company. Are you conservative, young and modern, corporate or a funky on-trend business?

This is your “brand” and all other communications such as blogs, articles, Facebook page and print material should have the same message. It should be created based on your target market, the people who buy your products or services. The message should be consistent and clear at all times, a message that reflects the brand that you are building.

Creating the content to build a brand is challenging. It starts with a strategy that includes an editorial calendar that outlines where, when and how the content will be distributed. Then continues with detailed analytics and a systematic review of the kind of articles and placements bring the most traffic to the website. This approach builds on what works and brings the visitors to your online storefront.

Good content in now even more important to get listed on the search engines. Creating content to support an integrated web presence requires more than minutes per day. It takes commitment and dedication.

Many small businesses have yet to take advantage of marketing resources at their fingertips. Some think that marketing equals big bucks but the increasing popularity of Online Marketing techniques and Social Media mean effective campaigns can be implemented on a small budget. Using these channels any business can build and develop a following that can be converted into market share.

The best marketing strategies combine offline and online activities to direct prospects to a website and a physical location. The most important component of the strategy is defining and understanding the target market. Creating messages that engage that audience will encourage prospects to make contact and to buy.

Ultimately, marketing is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves. Each customer interaction is an opportunity to cement this relationship.

Method: Stop posts to the blog, publish no articles and make no updates to the website for four weeks.

Observation: Traffic to the site was reduced by sixty percent.

Conclusion: Inbound strategy was driving traffic to the website.

The recovery plan is in place and it has taken over six weeks to recover the level of traffic. The blog posting schedule is back in place and articles are being written and submitted.

Every time someone challenges the effectiveness of an online communications strategy, the simple way to silence doubters is to conduct your own Scary Experiment and see what happens. This is a dramatic way to prove that a strategy works, it takes a lot of courage but it works.

One of my best clients and I recently took a walk on the “dark side”. We wanted to see if the scheduled blogging and articles strategy was really responsible for driving traffic to their website. So we stopped doing updates for a month.

Well the results speak for themselves. Traffic was down 25%. Of course we are now working hard to get it back to where it should be.

Our mission is to use all the tools at our disposal to create meaningful, original content that enable our clients to manage their social network presence. Stay tuned in, we have just started.

The life of content posted online is very, very, very long. It lives on long after it has served a useful purpose. When this content is repeated over different business and social networks, it can make or break your business or personal brand. All content that is associated with your brand should be part of a well defined social media strategy.

There is also nothing worse than having multiple unused social media profiles. Many people fall into this trap because they are too busy to post content on a consistent basis. Posts should be regular, engaging and offer value.

A ballpoint pen is a writing instrument with an internal ink reservoir and a sphere for a point. The internal chamber is filled with a viscous ink that is dispensed at its tip during use by the rolling action of a small sphere. The sphere, usually from 0.5 mm to 1.2 mm in diameter, may be made of brass, steel, tungsten carbide,[1] or any durable, hard (nondeformable) material.

László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages, and the sharp tip of his fountain pen often tore the paper. Bíró had noticed that inks used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Since, when tried, this viscous ink would not flow into a regular fountain pen nib, Bíró, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens. Bíró fitted this pen with a tiny ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Bíró filed a British patent on 15 June 1938.[5]

Source: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Our mission is to use all the tools at our disposal to create meaningful, original content that enable our clients to manage their social network presence. Stay tuned in, we have just started.